Attractive Romania

The Attractive Romania platform was launched in 2024

Daniel Onea, 17.10.2024, 13:52

Attractive Romania was launched in 2024. It is the most complex online platform created for the promotion of cultural tourism at home, Alao it is Romania’s first cultural program of this kind. The platform looks to present 12 cultural routes, using the online version of the information.

The cultural assets, such as castles, fortresses, traditional houses or the villages in the Danube Deltra have been documented with the help of specialists who worked together for the audio and video guides. The 275 tourist assets will be more accessible through the placement of the road infrastructure signaling route. Paul Opricean is a content expert. He explains how the online platform came about.

“Attractive Romania is a program of the European Investments and Projects Ministry which received public funding through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which started off from the idea whereby hundreds of tourist assets countrywide, maybe they are very little known. However, combined, they make a true cultural mosaic of the country, all of them having a tremendous historic and heritage value, for Romania, but also for the entire European space. And here I’m speaking about those objectives that have retained their vividness through their stories and legends, through the fine people in the local communities, who can still spin the yearn about them.

That is why, through this program, important steps are being made for their promotion, for the creation of a content which is attractive for tourists and, most importantly, for the creation of a road signaling infrastructure as, we must admit, it is important to find them easily. And here I’m speaking about the more than 8,000 such signaling systems which roughly cover 55,000 square kilometers countrywide. “

The twelve suggested theme routes cross the entire Romania, with 275 assets that are worth visiting and which, by 2026, will also be signaled through the specific road infrastructure. Unique, thanks to its video, photo content, through the virtual tours, animation, 3D reconstruction, audio guides, texts and reviews posted by the users, the platform bring the prospective tourist as close as possible to the experiences they can discover offline.

“Tourists can use the Attractive Romania platform in very many ways, for educational purposes, since it is both the most complex, specialist-validated digital library with info on cultural assets, and a source of inspiration for the planning of their future trips. To put it briefly, through the platform, the information can be accessed by the user online, through a dedicate website, at www.romania-atractiva.ro. Or through the free-of-charge app for the iOS and Android operating systems. The content is available in several of the most widely-spoken languages: English, Hungarian, French, German and Romani, while the platform brings together an extremely complex multimedia content. Practically, there are 5,800 video, photo, virtual tours, animation, 3D animation, audio guide and of course, texts that capture each an every tourist asset’s unique selling point. “

The cultural-artistic routes have completely different themes. Dwelling on that, here is Paul Opricean, a content expert with Attractive Romania:

“We have routes with a historical character that present castles, Roman castra, fortresses, towers, palaces. There are four more ecumenical routes, which highlight monasteries from Moldavia, wooden churches, fortified churches, and the Route of Saint Ladislaus. Then, we have a route of traditional Romanian gastronomy, one dedicated to the landscape of the Danube Delta, and a route that presents the value of villages with traditional architecture. Of all these, one of the most accessed within the platform is that of gastronomy. It’s an extremely complex route, which truly captures the richness of the entire Romanian culinary landscape, including its Balkan, Turkish, or Hungarian influences. That is exactly why I recommend it to tourists, because they must include them in their stops, must include any of the 30 gastronomic regions throughout the country. Here they will discover old recipes that they don’t imagine are preserved anymore, they will discover fresh, seasonal, flavorful ingredients and, perhaps most importantly, they will meet talkative storytellers along the way, at local food spots.”

On the other hand, the castle route proposes a return to the time of kings, knights and great battles, in an incursion full of history and mystery. Tourists are invited into halls where the echoes of balls still resound, and royal splendor meets the harsh shadows of bygone times. From mysterious ruins to fortifications transformed and restored over hundreds of years, every wall speaks of a lesser-known European history, intertwined with stories and legends. Here the secrets of the nobles and chapters of history full of glory, but also of dark times of torture and betrayal, are waiting to be discovered. “Tourists can make their own route according to their own preferences, they can make a combination between gastronomy and history, they can also include other types of tourist objectives. The platform is not limited to these main objectives, presented at length, it also includes a series of proposals for secondary, adjacent objectives. I encourage tourists, no matter where they come from, to firstly take an X-ray of all the cultural sites on the platform, read their story, see their extremely valuable content materials, to finally decide which one to visit and include them in their next trip. We should not aim to visit an entire route, from one end to the other. It would be complicated, since the targets are spread all over the country. Instead, we can create the perfect route for us, precisely based on the themes that arouse our interest. It is important to start the journey with openness, with enthusiasm, because every step through Attractive Romania tells a story.”

And the story of Attractive Romania has already aroused interest, as we learned from content expert Paul Opricean.

“The platform is already extremely accessible. There are more than 150,000 users, of which 50,000 are just downloads of the app on iOS and Android, and the echoes in the online environment are extremely strong. Social media platforms basically live by these cultural objectives that are known more and more. In terms of impact, we are talking about more than 6 million people who have already interacted with our content. Attractive Romania is a really successful platform, six months after its launch.”

Attractive Romania, the first national program to support cultural-historical tourism, started in 2023, and will conclude in June 2026.